Winner of the Rockower Award, the highest honor in Jewish journalism, this blog contains random musings of a journalist, father, husband, son, friend, poodle-owner, Red Sox fan and occasionally-ranting rabbi, taken from Shabbat-O-Grams, columns, speeches, letters, sermons and thin air. "On One Foot," the column, appears regularly in the New York Jewish Week, as well as a blog for the "Times of Israel."

As we sit here this Yom Kippur, we are
approaching an important date, a watershed in American
history, one that’s been anticipated for three decades. Almost exactly a month from today, the world
will usher in the date October 21, 2015.
And if you happen to be in Hill Valley, California, down by the Texaco
station and the clock tower, you might just see Marty McFly whiz by on his
hoverboard.

That’s right.October 21, 2015 was the date McFly and Doc
Brown set their sites on – you see, they needed to come to that future date
from the present, that is, October 21, 1985, which is now 30 years ago, in
order to correct something that was about to go terribly wrong to McFly’s
family.This came immediately after
“Back to the Future I,” when Marty and the Doc corrected a fatal flaw in McFly’sparents’ relationship by going back 30 years
earlier, to October 21, 1955, the date of the high school dance where Marty’s
parents had to fall in love.

So after all these years, we
have officially arrived in the future.

When I re-watched the films
recently, it was most interesting to see the world of 2015 as imagined in the
mid 1980s. The flying cars were a bit
ambitious. But the automated gas
stations were a good call. The power,
self-tying shoelaces, ah, not so much, although the smart watches and smart glasses they
predicted have come to pass. The
flying cameras were spot on. We call
them drones and they are annoying. The
garish outfits were a little off.

As was the assumption that sometime between
1985 and 2015 the Cubs would win a World Series, against a team from Miami. What amazed the 1985 McFly in the movie was
not that the Cubs won, because of course they would have won a World Series
at some point in those 30 years, but that there was a team in Miami, which
didn’t get a team until 1993. And it’s
almost eerie because it was the team from Miami that broke the hearts of Cub
fans in 2003. So chalk one up for the
Hollywood prognosticators.

Over these High Holidays, I’ve
talked a lot about the past and the present, using as a framework the ethical
dilemma regarding whether, if given the chance to go back in time, we would undo
the Holocaust by killing little two year-old Hitler in his sandbox.

This evening, I want to use that
speculation as a means to draw our attention not to the distant past, but to
the distant future, something that is much more difficult to do. Because it means getting beyond our own
expected lifespans. How often do we
actually pause to imagine a world six or seven decades from now, a world where
most of us in this room will no longer be alive. How
often do we stop to think about the world after us – one that will somehow go
on without us? It’s a scary thing to do. But it’s something we should do – and if not
on Yom Kippur, when?

We tend to live in the
past. It is a lot easier, in truth, to
focus on the past than on the future, and when we do look into the
future, we typically don’t venture out far beyond the tip of our noses. Even in “Back to the Future 2,” after just a
few scenes in 2015, the plot immediately takes Marty back to the safe and solid ground of
1955, where most of the movie takes place – 60 years ago.

There’s good reason for this. Whenever we try to guess what’s coming far
down the road, even experts
tend to be dumbfounded. In 2006,
technology whiz David Pogue wrote in The New York Times, “Everyone’s always asking me when Apple will
come out with a cell phone. My answer is, ‘Probably never.’ ”

In 1950, Ray Bradbury predicted a necessary colonization of Mars in the early
2000s due to a global nuclear war that would render the Earth
unlivable. In 1900, the Ladies’ Home
Journal predicted that by now,
all mice and rats would have been eliminated. So would the letters C, X,
and Q.

Plus, we don’t like to look too far down the
road. We’ve seen time and time again how
people will willingly mortgage the long-range future for the sake of short term
gain, in terms of debt, carbon emissions, food supply; hey, even in the Torah,
the future is mortgaged for a bowl of lentil soup. It was that incident that the Torah uses to
demonstrate that Esau is not fit for leadership. But Esau is hardly to be blamed for doing
what the rest of us do all the time. It is much easier to look backward, or
just a little bit ahead, than to gaze far into the unknown.

On a given Thursday, my Facebook page is treated to dozens of throwback
photos of creatures that look strangely like people I know, except they are fifty
pounds lighter, are wearing light blue leisure suits and they have hair. Thus far, I’ve yet to see a throw-ahead
Thursday, where people post photos of what they will look like thirty years
from now. There actually are several
websites that generates such photos.
Almost all the ones I saw are of current babies. Almost no one I know wants to do that for
themselves. We think we looked much better
in the past, in the superficial way we tend to judge appearance. Sometimes,
quite often, in fact, people really do look better as they age. We can see that in some of the amazing
photos you sent me for our montage in the lobby.

When I picture my father, the photos of him
toward the end of his life are the ones that warm my heart the most –
especially those few I have of the two of us together. I’ve included the last photo of the two of us
together in that montage – I was 21 at the time.

If we can imagine
ourselves in the distant future, studies show that it can be beneficial to how
we make key decisions today.

So close your eyes
for a minute and imagine this place, this exact spot, thirty years from now on
Yom Kippur. Imagine it 70 years from now
– that’s the amount of time Marty traversed in Back to the Future 3, where he
located Doc in the old West. He actually
could have looked in Stamford, where Christopher Lloyd was born.

Well, I have a
prediction, and you can take it to the bank.
The Jewish people will still be going strong 30 years from now, when
Marty McFly’s grandson Michel, comes
to services here on Yom Kippur, and 70 years from now, when his great grandson
Marty comes here. And I predict that
this synagogue will be here. And I’m
going to go out on a limb and predict… that I won’t.

Now you’re hearing
all this talk about the future from someone who is absolutely in love with
history. I’ve compiled over 250 online
photo albums for the temple and my family.
I’ve archived all my sermons going back 30 years. All my home movies are safe in the cloud. Every Bar Mitzvah speech from here is on my
server, and most emails going back at least fifteen years. It’s my job to love the past. That’s what rabbis do. Every
year, not only do I recall the Exodus at my seders, I’m schlepping out of Egypt
myself.

Reverence for the past
is a great strength of Judaism, giving us sense of roots, but what good are those roots if the branches aren’t reaching far up
into the sky?

We’re great at
looking back – we need to get better at looking ahead. And not just ahead to next Rosh Hashanah, or
to the break the fast, or to the end of this sermon, which I promise will be
before the break the fast. While we also
need to focus on the moment, we also have to look ahead - 30, 60, 70 years
ahead.

Yom Kippur, after
all, is not about cleaning up last year’s mess.
It’s about preventing next year’s.
The Kol Nidre prayer specifically asks God to annul, not vows that we’ve made over the past
12 months, but the ones we will make
over the months and years to come.

There’s the classic
Talmudic tale
of Honi the circle drawer, the Jewish Rip Van Winkle. Throughout his life Honi was always bothered
by the verse from Psalms:

"Shir ha-ma'alot: be-shuv adonai et shivat tzion, hayinu ke-cholmim

“When the Lord returned the exiles of Zion, we were as dreamers.”

He said, "Is
there anyone who dreams for seventy years?
In other words, is it possible
that the whole seventy-year Babylonian exile would seem like a dream?" One day, he was walking down the road when he
saw a man planting a carob tree.

Honi said to the
man, "How many years will this tree need to produce fruit?"

The man answered,
"Seventy years". There’s that
time frame again.

Honi said, "Is
it so clear to you that you will live seventy years?

The man answered,
"I found carob trees in the world. Just like my ancestors planted for me,
I plant for my children."

Honi sat to eat
some bread, and fell asleep. A pile of
rocks and dirt rose around him, and he was hidden from sight. He slept for
seventy years.

When he woke up, he
saw the same man picking (carobs) from the tree. Honi said to him, "Are
you the man who planted this tree?"

The man answered,
"I am his grandson."

The Talmud is teaching
us to take the long view. Always look
ahead – and don’t get so hung up the woulda
coulda shouldas. We should always be
as dreamers, imagining a world 6 or 7 decades from now, like the exiles did in
Babylonia, which, almost by definition, will be a world without us.

David Brooks who
wrote a terrific book this year about character, devoted a recent
column about learning from mistakes.
His point:

WE CAN’T CHANGE THE PAST, NOR SHOULD WE WANT TO.

Interestingly,
Brooks began the column with that same Hitler analogy that we’ve been
discussing. If we could go back and
somehow undo the Holocaust by killing baby Adolf, would we?

So imagine a world
with no Shoah? That is, imagine a world
where the deed of killing the young Hitler had taken place. How different would it be? A third of our people would not have been
killed. They would have survived to
write great novels, make fantastic scientific discoveries and bring Judaism to
new heights.

But Brooks asserts
that the world we have could never have come to be without World War
Two. The Hitler question is really about
changing all of the past. To erase
mistakes from the past is to obliterate your world now, he says. You can’t go
back and know then what you know now. You can’t step in the same river. Even Doc Brown could tell us that.

It’s a real good
point. If we were to change any event in
history, especially a massive event such as the Holocaust, everything taking
place after that event would now be different.
Which means, if you want to get technical about it, that anyone born
after the Holocaust would most likely not have been born. If that’s what almost happens to Marty McFly when
his parents nearly don’t fall in love at the high school dance; how much more
so would it happen to us if 6 million Jews had not been killed and the world
had not been decimated by a cataclysmic war.

So here’s the
tradeoff – and THIS is the real ethical dilemma - It’s not whether or
not to kill Hitler, so one life would be sacrificed to save millions. What if the quandary is whether to kill
two-year old Adolf and save the six million, but the cost would be giving up your
own existence. Six million survive – and
most of us are never born. Not even
Sophie faced such a choice!

Would you choose to
have the world exactly as it is right now, with a Holocaust; or one without a
Holocaust, but without you…a
completely different world with a completely different set of people? Who knows, possibly no Israel; on the bright
side, no Kardashians – but if you are under the age of 70, no you.

So that question
about changing the past, teaches us that it is pointless to dwell on the
could-have-beens, and points us toward the might-yet-be’s. The real question at hand, the one I touched
on at the beginning: Can we take the long view?

And the corollary: Can we get beyond ourselves?

Taking the long
view and getting beyond ourselves has been the secret to Jewish survival for
3,000 years.

One rabbi who
survived a Siberian gulag, spoke of how he learned the secret to survival from
a tightrope walker who was also imprisoned there. The rabbi asked the tightrope walker the
secret of his art. Is it balance?
Concentration? Stamina?

“No,” the tightrope
walker said. “The secret is always
keeping the destination in focus. Because,
when you lose sight of your destination, even if just for a second, that’s when
you will fall.”

The whole world is
a very narrow bridge; so the key is not to fear – and not to look down!

You can’t look
down. You can’t watch your toes. And you can’t look back. That was the sin of Lot’s wife.

And, one more
thing: you can’t take a selfie when you
are on a tightrope. I believe that was
what Lot’s wife was doing.

This has been
called the “Age of Entitlement,” and it’s arguable that we are living in the
most narcissistic era in human history.

It’s not just about one generation. Can’t just
blame the millennials here. After all,
the baby boomers have been the most entitled generation in history. New York Magazine dubbed the 1970s the “Me
Decade,” and Time
Magazine recently called those born since the 1980s the Me Me Me Generation. So there’s a healthy competition as to which
generation is more self centered, but it’s the culture as whole, all generations
that have been moving inexorably toward the veneration of “me”.

There are
psychological tests for self-centeredness.
For whatever reason, the median narcissism score has risen by thirty
percent over the past twenty years.

A recent book, “The
Narcissism Epidemic,” describes a broad range of cultural symptoms, including
increases in materialism and self-promotion. There are specific, “measurable
changes in many variables, including plastic surgery rates, credit card debt,
the use of "my" in web addresses, and the square footage of personal
homes. Then there are the reality TV
shows, the narcissistic song lyrics, and the fake paparazzi one can now hire to
experience what it’s like to be famous.

If my sermons were
Oscar nominated films, Rosh Hashanah’s would have been “Boyhood” and tonight,
“Birdman,” which won Best Picture; it’s all about self centeredness and facing
the fact that what we fear most of all is not simply our mortality, but the
prospect of disappearing and becoming irrelevant while we are still alive,
or of living only in a world where one can’s existence can be validated only by
a naked jaunt Times Square that goes viral.

What is most
remarkable about all the characters in “Birdman” is that, whether or not they
are relevant, they are all miserable as they wallow in their self-centeredness. It is the perfect film to for this era. We’ve gone from the “Greatest Generation” to
the “Instant Gratificat-est Generation.” The ideal relationships have gone from ones
that can’t be torn asunder, to ones that are born of Tinder. (And, yes. I do know that some wonderful
committed relationships have come from Tinder – but I couldn’t resist the
line!)

And the me me me era is being showcased in the
current presidential campaign. I’ll say
no more about that!

Like the Pharaohs
of old, we try to ensure immortality by building monuments to ourselves, but
that’s hard to achieve. As Woody Allen
said, “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve
immortality through not dying. I
don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my
apartment.”

There are also some
wonderful things about this culture. But
it becomes dangerous when we lose the ability to get beyond ourselves.

Now Judaism is not
looking for us all to become selfless ascetics and shuffle off to a monastery
in the Wilderness. Thank God for
that. It is possible to live a life of
service to others while also maintaining a healthy concern for number one.

In the Yom Kippur liturgy, we read how the
most selfless figure imaginable, the high priest, made three confessions in the
Holy of Holies. The first was for
himself. But even in praying for
himself, he includes his household, his family.
Then he confesses for all the cohanim; and only then for all the people
of Israel. And before he does this, he
immerses in a ritual bath, taking care of his own spiritual and physical
needs. We do have to think of ourselves
first – like that announcement on an airplane to put the oxygen mask in
ourselves before our children.

We have to think of
ourselves, but it can’t end there.

As David Foster
Wallace, the brilliant writer who died in 2008, said in a famous commencement
address at Kenyon College, “Think about it,” he told the graduating
millennials, “there is no experience you've had that you were not at the
absolute center of.” He said “natural,
basic self-centeredness…is our default setting, hard-wired into us at birth.”

And then he spoke
of his life’s work seeking liberation from the tyranny of the self. We need to do that too.

This
list was found in a church-based periodical. It rings true for all of us:

HOW TO BE PERFECTLY
MISERABLE

-Think about yourself.

-Talk about yourself.

- Use “I” as
often as possible.

-Expect to be appreciated.

-Be suspicious.

-Be jealous and envious.

-Be sensitive to slights.

-Never forgive a criticism.

-Trust no one but yourself.

-Demand agreement with your own views on everything.

-Sulk if people are not grateful to you for favors
shown them.

-Never forget a service you may have rendered.

-Do as little as possible for others.

-Love yourself supremely.

Those who can never
get beyond the “me,” whose lives consist only of instant gratification and the
illusion of immortality, for whom it is always about “me,” they will find only
despair in the end.

Because I have news
for you. If we are lucky enough to live
long enough, life eventually crushes us all.

I visit hospitals
and nursing homes several times each week - more now than ever, since my mother
went to the Jewish Home. So now I see it
up close, all the time, professionally and personally. I
spend my life witnessing crushed dreams, dreams demolished by disability and
disease and the lengthening of the human life span.

“We were as
dreamers” the Psalmist said. But when
Honi slept for only 70 years, and he did not wake up with Alzheimers, or
cancer. He just had a sleep disorder.

The Jewish concept
of immortality forces us to get beyond our little selves. Yes, there is belief in the immortality of
the soul, but our salvation is guaranteed primarily through the endless chain
of Jewish tradition – handed down from generation to generation – through the
collective enterprise, on this earth, known as the Jewish people, an enterprise
that will be here long after we are gone.

To ensure that Jewish
future, one that will fill this room a generation from now, when we are all
gone, we need three things:

1) We need Jews, actual living Jews. So go make some! (Thare are lots of ways to do
that – I might be doing it right now!)

2) We need Jews who
dream Jewish dreams.

And the third
thing: we need to never give up, on
anything or anyone. Because the Jewish
story is constantly unfolding.

Oliver Sacks, who
passed away a couple of weeks ago, would have been considered a dropout by the
established Jewish community. I
mentioned on Rosh Hashanah that he left partly because of the abusive reaction
of his parents to his coming out. He also was turned off by the internal
politics of the Jewish community. Join
the club!

But in his
beautiful and valedictory op-ed in the New York Times last month, “Sabbath,”
he described a renewed appreciation for the spiritual underpinnings of his
childhood faith – a spirituality that never left him, even as he left what we
short sightedly call the fold. He never
abandoned our Jewish cultural propensity to ask questions, something a Jewish child
learns at our very first Seder.

“The thousand and
one questions I asked as a child,” he wrote, “were seldom met by impatient or
peremptory answers, but careful ones which enthralled me (though they were often
above my head). I was encouraged from the start to interrogate, to
investigate.”

No, Oliver Sacks
was never lost to the Jewish people. In
fact, we can now look back and thank God that he did leave the insular
world of his childhood. Had he not, the
world would have been denied a brilliant thinker – one who thought Jewishly. We need to take the long view, as one would
with so many others who were thought lost, or whom we think are lost
today.

In the year 2025,
ten years from now, Judaism will still be alive, and it will be in 2055 too. But in 2055, or 2075, what will our lives have meant. When people are seeing OUR photos on the
montage in the lobby, or visiting us in the cemetery next door, or remembering
us right here at Yizkor, will they remember that we were able to get beyond our
self centered impulses to live a life of service – and that we did what we
needed to do to assure that the Jewish dream would continue to thrive – so that
we might help repair the world?

Reinhold Niebuhr said famously, “Nothing that is
worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.”

And Rabbi Elazar
Ha-Kappur said, "It was not your will that formed you nor was it your
will that gave you birth (Avot 4:29).”

Our purpose comes
from beyond us. We didn’t choose to be
born. We can’t determine what will be
our most lasting legacy. But to be truly
lasting, it will need to outlast us.

Similarly, Victor
Frankl, who survived the Holocaust, said he was able to survive because
survival became his calling – something that helped him to transcend his sorry
lot: “It really did not matter what we
expected from life, but what life expected from us.”

It’s not all about me.

It reminds me of the
incredible scene I witnessed when I visited Terezin fifteen years ago.

At the end of a
long and emotional tour of the camp, the guide brought us to a site only
recently discovered, a small synagogue hidden in the basement of a bakery. It
was an oasis of holiness in the midst of hell, never defiled by the Nazis, a
place where the condemned could utter ancient prayers and dare to hope.

On the walls are
Hebrew liturgical inscriptions, two of which absolutely floored me. One says,
"Know before whom you stand," a verse found in synagogues everywhere,
but one that took on a whole new meaning in that place; for on the other side
of that wall stood the S.S. guards. They knew in their hearts that the One
before whom they really stood was God, a sovereign whose very existence they
certainly had every reason to doubt. In spite of it all, they believed.

And with belief
comes vision. On the front wall of the synagogue is inscribed a verse from the
Amida, "May our eyes be able to envision
Your return to Zion in mercy." “V’techezena
aynaynu b’shivcha l’tziyon b’rachamim.” The
Jewish people waited 2,000 years to return to Jerusalem. They recited this line 3 times a day, facing
Jerusalem, whether living in Babylonia, Spain, Alsace, Lublin, London, Moscow
or Buenos Aires. Or Stamford
Connecticut. What sustained them was
their ability to take the long view.

"Hazon"
in Hebrew means "vision" and that word is embedded in the inscribed
verse. Note that the prayer doesn’t ask that the people themselves be whisked
to Zion. The Jews of Terezin were not so quixotic as to imagine that they
themselves would ever see the spectacular sunrise over Jerusalem. Even though they said, “May OUR eyes behold…”
they really weren’t praying for their own return to Zion, but for God’s – and
the Jewish people’s.

Hidden away for a
moment of sanity amidst the madness, these selfless heroes had the audacity to
pray that God and the Jewish people survive the Holocaust, even though they
knew that they themselves most likely would not. They not only saw the light at
the end of the darkest tunnel in human history, they shined it toward a distant
future that no sane person could possibly have imagined, a future that
certainly would not include them.

A future where they,
though long dead, could be redeemed. And now, seventy years later, Honi has
awakened and seen that planted carob tree in Jerusalem. And we are all as dreamers. That is the future that they imagined – and
the one we must imagine. One that we can
inspire. One that we can advance. A healthier planet, a safer world, a more
peaceful world. A more peaceful
Israel.

Maybe a world without
hoverboards. Maybe a world where Marty
McFly has Parkinsons and Doc Brown goes on to play Uncle Fester in the Addams
Family. But a better world. And a world
where the Jewish message will be more relevant than ever, and - if we play our
cards right, there will be more than enough Jews to carry it, refine it and
reinvent it.

Rabbi Israel
Salanter wrote: “Every act of kindness is a prayer – a prayer that walks,
moves, breathes and lives.” If we can
live exemplary lives, lives of service, our very lives will become the prayers
of our children and grandchildren, or the child we mentored and hugged.

So my third answer
to the ethical dilemma is this. No, I
would not change history and kill two-year-old Hitler in order to prevent the
Holocaust. Nor would I go back and
change a single choice that I’ve made, even ones that I regret. Life is not lived backward; it is lived forward. In fact, it is lived fast forward. It is lived far
forward.

For while we humbly
accept that we can’t change history, let us boldly affirm that can make history
– and let us forge that future as we walk along that tightrope, one step at a
time, never looking down, never looking at ourselves, but always by imagining
unborn worlds while fulfilling ancient dreams.

Yom Kippur 5776 - Truth and Trust

By Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

A rabbi told his congregation, “Next Shabbat
I plan to preach about the sin of lying. To help you understand my sermon, I
want you all to read Ecclesiastes chapter 13.”

The following week, as he prepared to deliver
his sermon, the rabbi asked for a show of hands. “How many read Ecclesiastes
13?” Several went up. The rabbi smiled and said, “Ecclesiastes has only twelve
chapters. I will now proceed with my sermon on the sin of lying.”

How often on a given day are we lied to? According to a 2002 study conducted by the
University of Massachusetts, three quarters of adults can't have a ten-minute
conversation without lying at least once (well, actually it’s 60 percent…I lied).

But even that number makes it sound better
than it really is; those people in the study who did lie actually told an
average of 3 lies during their brief chat.

So where do we lie most? 40 percent lie on their resumes. Online dating sites? 90 percent lie on their profiles. About what?
Weight, height, wealth, education, age, and of course, weight. And we won’t even begin to talk about the
altered photos.

By about age 2.5-3
about 70% of children are capable of lying, and some can do it well. At age
four, they will peek when told not to do so. Young children will lie about
actions, but not about how they feel. By age 10 they are more sophisticated
because they can pretend. As they get older, cheating becomes more common.

“Most of us lie and are lied to on a regular basis,” wrote Ralph Keyes
in his book, “The Post Truth Era.” The
lies run the gamut from “I like sushi” to “I love you.” Even though we are more likely to deceive
strangers than friends, we save our most serious lies for those we care about
the most.”

Shmuel says in the Talmud, "The
Commandment 'Do not steal' includes the prohibition against stealing a person’s
trust with misleading words.” It’s
called “G’nayvat Da’at” (also see here). The
sages delineated seven types of thieves, and that this was considered the
worst. And indeed, so many of the sins
we talk about on Yom Kippur involve words and deceit.

Truth and trust are inextricably linked. In the evening service, the prayer just after
the Sh'ma begins with those two words, interlocked, “Emet V'Emunah,"
truth and trust, in Hebrew. They go hand in hand. The Talmud (Berachot 12a) notes that the word Emunah is included in
the evening service in particular, because,
in the words of Psalm 92, "It is good to give thanks unto God and to
declare your trustworthiness at night
(emunatecha balaylot)." When things are dark and murky, the truth
is much more difficult to discern. At
times like that, when things are not so black and white, we have to rely on
trust.

These days, there’s a whole lot that is
murky. Even back in the Vietnam and
Watergate eras, people could still believe in the tooth fairy and Walter
Cronkite. But now we are witnessing a
total, worldwide breakdown of trust such as we have never seen before.

Here in America, a Pew survey on trust in government
last year showed historic lows. In 1958,
73 percent of Americans trusted the government.
But by 2014, that number had gone down to 23 percent.

But government is not alone. Trust in the military is dropping, as is trust in the media. Only seven percent of Americans polled have a
large amount of confidence in the media, while 44 percent have hardly any at
all.

Not that we in the religion biz should be
getting too complacent – Gallup this past June released a survey stating that Americans’
distrust of religion is on the rise. Just 42 percent said they have a great
deal or quite a lot of confidence in “the church or organized religion.”

But among Jews, confidence was put at an astounding 98 percent. It’s right there in Ecclesiastes 13!

No, in fact it’s been a bad year for rabbis
and trust. One glaring example is Rabbi
Barry Freundel, who spied on conversion students preparing for ritual immersion
in his synagogue’s mikva in Washington – he was one of the most trusted rabbis
around.

We’ve come to believe in the old X-Files catchphrase,
trust no one.

Every year Readers Digest puts out a list of
the most trusted people in America. If
you were to look at any random year over the past couple of decades you would
undoubtedly see, right at the top, names like Brian Williams and Bill
Cosby. I venture to guess that their
names might drop a tad on next year’s list.
I won’t even try to discuss the
substance of these two cases, which are very different, but we all shared a
deep disappointment.

Deflated footballs this year became the very
symbol of how deflated we all have been felt about our role models and leaders.
The specifics of the case are not
relevant to this discussion, which is a good thing – ‘cause don’t get me
started - but whether our ire was directed at the player or the league, everyone
was deeply disappointed in someone. While
I’ve stood by Tom Brady, I recognize that there is something far more important
happening here. As Neil Gabler wrote, “If Tom Brady was the quintessential American
during his time of grace, he may be even more quintessentially American in his
time of his alleged disgrace. We just
don’t believe in (our heroes) anymore.”

Dan Wasserman
wrote: When we talk about American exceptionalism, it used to be that we were
talking about our innate goodness. Now
we’re talking about our exceptional capacity to swindle. For the last 50 years, “we have been living
within a well-earned nimbus of cynicism that has taught us that even when there
isn’t smoke, there is likely to be fire. You could even call cynicism a form of
self-protection — a way to prove that we can’t be duped by anyone. It is also a
form of sophistication — a way of saying we are now too smart to believe that
everyone isn’t basically corrupt. In short, we don’t believe in innate goodness
any more.”

We’ve given up on
heroes. We’ve given up on trust itself. We’ve changed our language to reflect an
inbred cynicism that has become downright Orwellian. Stephen Colbert even invented a word, “truthiness,” meaning “lies that
sound like the truth.” And the person who steadfastly denies widely accepted
truths should be called a liar, but instead that person is now called a
“truther.”

Everything is
upside down.

So who tops the
current Reader’s Digest list of the most
trusted? Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep. They’re all actors.

No doubt they are
people of integrity, and off screen they have done wonderful things – but their
very job is to fool us into thinking that
they are someone else!!! Off screen,
we call that hypocrisy. Of course, off
screen we call the NFL assault and battery. And in case you were wondering, Doctor Oz is
number 16 and I don’t think Josh Dugger was ever on the top 100 list; but if he
was, he’s not now.

And the first
politician on the list? Michelle Obama
at 19. And she’s not even a politician.

Back in the ‘80s,
Ronald Reagan used to say, “Trust, but verify.”
These days, when it comes to politics, the motto is more like, “Mistrust,
and vilify.” Or possibly, “Trust, but first,
Google the guy, then check out Wikileaks and, oh yes, Ashley Madison.”

I read that the
Ashley Madison hack is having a serious effect on churches. As many as 400 pastors, deacons, elders and
church staff members were expected to resign after their names surfaced on the
list of users revealed in the hack.

I don’t know about rabbis, but it’s a
good thing there’s no Ashley Madison for forbidden cheeseburgers.

But here is the
premise to this talk: Our society cannot
survive without trust.

So we need to
discuss how to rebuild it.

Because ultimately,
trust has little to do with the NFL or Brian Williams. It’s about something far deeper. It’s about trusting the world. It’s about waking up in the morning, looking
out the window and having an innate confidence that the garbage will be
collected, the supermarket will have bread on the shelves and the weatherman
will be right at least some of the time.

It’s also about
trusting that your mom or dad will stand by you when times get rough. It’s about trusting that, when the world is
crashing down on you, your congregation and clergy will be there for you. It’s about trusting that your significant
other is not in bed with someone else and that your government is not tracking
your every move.

And it’s about
dealing with people in honest, ethical ways, as was said by Rav Yosi in the
Talmud, letting your yes be yes, and your no be no (Baba Metzia 49a), to which Abaye responded, “That means
that one must not speak one thing with the mouth and another with the heart.

Judaism guides us
on how to rebuild trust on a number of levels: in business and community, in
family life and in times of personal crisis. So let’s look at each.

In business and community relations. So much revolves around trust. An entire tractate of the Talmud discusses
the importance of returning lost objects to their
owner, so that people will know that their neighbors always have their
back.

In commerce too. The Talmud states
that a merchant may not combine different grades of produce in one bin. A wine salesman whose wine has become diluted with water may not sell it unless he makes it
known to his customer, and in any event, he may not sell it to another vendor,
even if he makes full disclosure, for fear that the second salesman will
deceive his customers.

Here’s an example
of how our ancestors strictly avoided benefiting from any form of potentially
deceptive behavior. It shows how far
reaching and how serious the prohibition of mental theft was taken.

Rabbi Safra was
once saying his morning prayers when a customer came by to buy his donkey.
Because he refused to interrupt his prayers, Rabbi Safra did not answer.
Interpreting the rabbi's silence as disapproval of the price offered, the buyer
offered a higher amount. When the rabbi still did not answer, the buyer raised
his offer again. After the rabbi finished his prayers, he said to the buyer,
"I had decided to sell you my donkey at the first price you mentioned, but
I did not want to interrupt my prayers to speak to you. Therefore, you may have
it at that price - I will not accept the higher bids."

In personal
relationships, trust is paramount.

A couple of weeks ago, I emailed a list of 36 probing questions, devised by a
psychologist to help determine compatibility and enhance relationships. The idea is that mutual vulnerability fosters
trust and intimacy. I noted in my email that
many of these 36 questions can also help us to deepen our spiritual connections
with Judaism and our community – a relationship that is also very personal.

It’s so important not to allow the
distrust that is so pervasive in our society to seep through these walls, and hold
us back from fully realizing our full spiritual potential. Our temple leadership recognizes how fragile
trust can be and does all the practical things to enhance trust – the calls
made by board members, the surveys, the annual financial reviews, the fifty
thousand emails a week, about two thirds of them from me – we are constantly
looking for ways to earn and sustain your trust. Full disclosure: we really do aim for full
disclosure!

But at some point, religion always lets us
down. Maybe it’s something little like
changing a start time for services, or our computer messing up a yahrzeit date,
or our not being sufficiently attentive at a time of illness, or the real need
to raise funds, or perhaps more
profound. There are lots of reasons for
people to lose faith in religious faith.
Many have trouble praying, and in particular to a God who let Six
Million die or to a God who let a loved one suffer needlessly, or to a God who
would allow them to change the melody to Ein Kelohenu.

Whatever it is, religion constantly betrays
our trust, and because of that, we’ve strayed.
We’ve strayed. We’ve strayed from
synagogue, from community, from Israel, from Judaism, from our deepest selves,
from our youthful idealism. We’ve
strayed. At times we’ve all become the
second child of the Seder, the one who points an accusatory finger and asks, “What
is all this to you???” The second child
has given up on the very notion of finding any meaning in Jewish life for
himself.

So this is a question I want you to ask yourselves
right now – where has Judaism let you down, where have you lost trust in it –
and how can it – and we – get you back?

If you feel completely at ease and fulfilled
as a Jew, that’s great. So then you can
ask what we might do to rebuild trust with whoever isn’t here today. And we all
know someone. Most of us know many
“someones.” It’s important.

We need to do this and we need to do this urgently,
before we all become the fourth child
of the Seder, the one who doesn’t even know how to ask.

So we’ve discussed the
need to rebuild trust in commerce and business and in our relationships with
loved ones and with Judaism and our community.

But on an even
deeper level – let’s dig deeper - there is a basic trust in the universe that
we are lacking that feeds into everything else.
When disaster occurs, how does one go on?

Sheryl Sandberg wrote a moving Facebook posting this year, to commemorate
the end of the traditional 30 days of mourning for her husband, Dave Goldberg. She wrote of her experience during that
month, and her slow, incremental journey that helped her to open up to the
world once again:

“I have learned
gratitude.” She said. “Real gratitude
for the things I took for granted before—like life. As heartbroken as I am, I look at my children
each day and rejoice that they are alive. I appreciate every smile, every hug….
My next birthday will be depressing as hell, but I am determined to celebrate
it in my heart more than I have ever celebrated a birthday before.”

You know the old
joke about the Jewish telegram, the one that states: "Start worrying.
Letter follows." That perfectly
captures the Jewish mindset for the past 2,000 years. There are times when it feels like the
universe is crashing down all around us – and for many of us, that has become
the default perspective. As Shalom Aleichem wrote, “April Fools
is a joke—repeated 365 times a year.”

Several months back,
a congregant who had going through tough times was able to summon her strength
to at last take a well-deserved vacation.
And sure enough, at just that moment, while she was far, far away, just
as she let down her guard, she got the horrible word that her mother had died.

She wrote to me,
“Now I feel like if I don’t worry about EVERY LITTLE THING IN THE ENTIRE
UNIVERSE, someone I love is going to die.”

I wrote back – it
was just before Passover, saying, “I know the feeling. It gets to the point
where you start to feel that if you don't constantly revert to grief mode, the
Universe will punish you for your hubris. As with any human relationship,
when you are burned, it's hard to learn to trust again.

You have every
reason to be skittish right now. It's a big leap from misery mode to
one-day-at-a-time mode, from Grief Brain to Rational Brain - which still exists
in there behind the Grief Brain – and recognizes this is totally irrational and
ridiculous, but that doesn’t stop Grief Brain from running the show at the
moment. And hovering above it all is the
simple horrible fact that what happened is so inexplicable and so unfair - and
the loss is so unbearable.

Given all of that,”
I added, “this year's Seder will likely be a placeholder - for next year's.
At some point, we'll be able to look at this escape from danger on its
own merits, detached from the grief of the moment, and say "Dayenu."”

Dayenu. Some people try to get to “Yes.” We Jews simply hope to get to “Dayenu.”

“It’s enough.”

Not “YES.” But “OK…”

How can we at least
get to Dayenu? So
many forces are conspiring to harden us, to keep us from trusting anything and
anyone – all the things I’ve mentioned, from incurable disease to Bill
Cosby. But on top of all that, we Jews have
one other little matter.

We have the
Holocaust.

So the question can
be asked. Seventy years after Hitler’s
death, is it time for the Jewish people to be able to say, “Dayenu?” Is it time
for us to declare that grief brain is no longer running the show?

Seventy years is a
biblical lifetime. It’s a Talmudic
generation - for those who were here last night, it’s as long as Honi the
Circle drawer slept. So it makes perfect
sense that after seventy years, we can at last envision new possibilities and
remove ourselves from the traumas of the past. And now, it is seventy years after
Auschwitz. Is it time, at last, to slay
the dragon, the wipe away the nightmare of Hitler, to pull that nightmare out
from the roots – as it were – to get up not from shiva but from shiv’im, seventy – and to rise from the
chair of grief, to trust the future once again?

Up until these past
few weeks, I’ve felt it was still too soon; but recent events have convinced me
that it’s important for the Jewish people to get beyond perpetual grief and
victimhood, to a place where we can once again see all the colors of the
rainbow, rather than looking at the world through the grainy black and white of
Schindler’s List, punctuated by the occasional little girl’s red coat – or
yellow star?

The use of Holocaust imagery was brought to
new lows during the recent Iran debate, yes, by our enemies, as it always is, but also by many Jews, too
many Jews. That’s what made me realize
how important it is for us to turn the page.
We need to remember the Holocaust, but in recent years, we have
converted our priceless, forward looking faith into the Church of Our Lady of
the Perpetual Victim.

Natalie
Portman feels that way. She’s got
street cred on this subject. She played
Anne Frank on Broadway and her great-grandparents were killed in Auschwitz.

It came as a bit of
a shocker when Portman stated that maybe the
Jewish community is a little too stuck on the Holocaust. She said:

“We need to be
reminded that hatred exists at all times…(and we need) to be empathetic to
other people that have experienced hatred also.”

She was attacked pretty
viciously for those comments, but I think she had a point. It’s time to stop comparing every diplomatic
agreement to Munich, every terror attack to Auschwitz and every dude that
threatens us to Hitler. With all the
times Munich has been invoked, one would think Neville Chamberlain had as many descendants as Wilt Chamberlain.

Google “Hitler” and
you will find 101 MILLION results - the past year alone, over seventeen
million. The guy is dead seventy
years. We are giving this guy a shelf
life he doesn’t deserve. It’s time to
slay the demon. It’s time to put little
Adolf to bed, once and for all.

Listen, no one
should be naïve to the real dangers that exist. One reason we are afraid to
trust again is that we’ve been burned by trust in the past. And by burned I don’t just mean
metaphorically. So I get it. It would be naïve to believe that after the
scores of terror bombings, the thousands of missiles, and a million broken
dreams, anyone would be willing to take large risks to trust the world right
now, especially Israelis.

But it would be
equally wrong for us to crawl into a corner and give in to despair. That’s why we’ll be recalling the hopeful words
of Yitzchak Rabin later in this service, marking 20 years since his murder; and
it’s why our interfaith council is planning a pilgrimage to Israel next spring
- to help nurture a vision of reconciliation, both there and here. The Pope has made it clear that one reason he
is coming to our area is that New Yorkers shine a light unto the world in the area
of interfaith dialogue. We’ve become
leaders in that area. Our local
interfaith council is the only one in the country whose president is a
Muslim. We need to shine that light to
the world. It is not ours to finish the
job of finding common ground with our neighbors, but neither are we at liberty
to desist from that task.

So I agree with
Natalie Portman, who reflects the way many younger Jews are feeling, and why so
many have become so turned
off by their Jewish communities, especially over the past few months.

By killing the
demon, I am not suggesting that we forget. Heaven forbid we should forget the Holocaust! On the contrary, any Judaism to emerge out of
this new era must place the Holocaust experience directly at its core, or it
will not be authentic; it will fail to speak to our need to confront this black
hole in our history. But just as the new Judaism we are forging cannot ignore
or deny the abyss, it must also speak to our religious need to affirm joy,
beauty, renewed life and at least the possibility of a responsive divinity, or
it will not be sustainable. There needs
to be a new balance between Auschwitz and Sinai that takes into account the
lessons of both.

Our goal should be
nothing less than for the next generation to see bearing witness not as a
burden, but as a privilege, an honor, and yet another source of pride in who
they are.

Just last week, one
of our college students, Eloise Hyman, visited Poland. She was in Kraków on Rosh Hashanah and went
to the main synagogue so she could celebrate the holiday with other Jews, as
she always has. But there were no Jews
to be found. The synagogue was open – as
a museum. Yes, there is some budding
Jewish life in Kraków but it is hard to get beyond the feeling that, Jewishly
speaking, it is still one enormous ghost town.
The buildings are magnificent, many recently restored: but they are
empty shells.

It is a painful and
chilling reminder of how much was lost, how many lives destroyed.

Eloise wrote, “I
walked in and about thirty seconds later walked out because I was crying: on
one of the holiest days of the Jewish year, a synagogue was open as a museum
and not used for services or closed out of respect. I very much felt the hole
where the Jewish community of Kraków should be.”

Eloise’s anguish is
not the anguish of a victim. She is
representative of a new generation, one that is demonstrating how the Holocaust
can motivate our children toward a positive Jewish identity — not one based on
shame, hatred, revenge, victimhood and despair. I believe the Holocaust can be a prime
positive factor in Jewish continuity.

I
believe that the Jewish people of Eloise’s generation, or Natalie Portman’s,
can learn to channel the pain into empathy, and not use it cynically to shut
ourselves off from the world or, as still happens all too often – to gain
votes.

When I was in Peru
last summer, right around Tisha B’Av, I was struck by how the Incan shrines of
the Sacred Valley were so brutally destroyed by the same Spanish rulers who
were exiling and murdering their nation’s Jewish community. We Jews faced the same exact enemy at the
exact same time, but we had no idea that there were other victims of the
Inquisition’s iron grip, half a world away.

We were not the
only victims of Spain’s greed and missionary zeal. Nor were we Hitler’s only victims. And we are not the only ones to face the
evils of our time.

Yes, so many have
betrayed us. But we need to overcome the cynicism and despair that absolutely
crushes us. Our own pain must not cause us to apply blinders so that we do not
see the pain of our neighbor.

How can we rebuild hope
in this dark and murky world? One person
at a time. One relationship at a time.
One act of kindness at a time. We can’t wait for others to do it for us. We have to do it ourselves.

And after all, this
is the year 5776, tav-shin-ayin-vav.
Reverse two of the letters and you get Ta’asu. “Just do it.” This is year to take action; so that through
our love and commitment, through our “yes that is yes,” we all might learn to
trust again.

And so our journey
comes to a close. So how would I respond
to the ethical dilemma put in front of us, the question of whether to kill the
two year old fledgling madman?

I’ve presented four
responses: By hugging the child, no matter who he or she may be; by reasserting
the value of conscience and restraint; by taking the long view and thereby
overcoming our inbred self centeredness; and finally, by cutting off at the roots,
at long last, the nightmares that continues to haunt us, so that we might learn
to have trust once again in the wondrous and priceless gift we have been
given. We must conquer the mistrust that
paralyzes us, whether in commerce, in the public square, at home, in the
synagogue or in the depths of our souls.
Too much is at stake – and there is so little time.

“Tell me, what is
it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

As we enter this
year of action, it is time to turn away from the darkness of the past, to rise
from shiv’im and proclaim an end to
our grief.

And may we declare
to the world – and most of all to ourselves, the most truthful words we can
utter: that to be a Jew is to be a victim no more. We must overcome our cynicism and restore
trust to the world, finding inspiration from our ancient sources of wisdom.

For as the Bible itself
proclaims:

גַּם מִגָּבֹהַּ יִרָאוּ, וְחַתְחַתִּים בַּדֶּרֶךְ

“…When they shall
be afraid of heights and there is terror along the way…

…לִמְצֹא
דִּבְרֵי-חֵפֶץ; וְכָתוּב יֹשֶׁר, דִּבְרֵי אֱמֶת.

…(Nonetheless let
us) find our comfort in our words of delight our deep sources of wisdom and find
there the sources of truth.”